Someone to watch over me
The dogwoods are in bloom, the trees covered in pink and white blossoms, the discs of flower faces, simple petals turned towards the sun. By lunchtime, the sidewalk cafes are filling, patrons turning towards the blue skies and warmth after long days of rain.
It’s April, and I went to a jazz bar to listen to standards. It’s not that “April in Paris” is a favorite, but it sets the mood. Many jazz standards are about springtime, when the blood runs warm along with the sap.
When did I fall in love with jazz? Maybe it was the idea of New York City, the jazz cafes, foreheads touching, bent over martini glasses, a renowned crooner, and a quartet in a small venue. I’d never listened to jazz before, but sought places to go, the West End Café close to me on the Upper West Side, the Blue Note, and Sweet Basil’s down in Greenwich Village.
Falling in love with jazz was falling in love with love, making romance reality.
My first boss shared albums and performer names with me, documentaries, and magazines. Jazz and the civil rights movement were joined, races mingling for the music. I worked at the Human Rights Division, traipsed all around the City on investigations, took the A train, and the crosstown bus.
I bought a jazz book and collected the classics for a good library of albums — John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Modern Jazz Quartet, Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone. I dropped into vespers at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Manhattan, the chapel newly styled by Louise Nevelson, the sculptor, jazz greats jamming at 5 o’clock on Sunday, coffee afterwards with Billy Taylor or Charlie Mingus at my elbow. I ran into Roberta Flack on my neighborhood sidewalk.
I loved the blues and the classics, no matter how politically wrong: “Someone to watch over me” and “Someday he’ll come along.” I’ve left instructions that “I’ll be seeing you” is one of the songs at my funeral.
I love the quartet, quintet, the singer, the melody, the riffs on the melody, the keyboardist bent over the piano as his fingers fly, the saxophonist taking over, or the extemporaneous clarinet or trumpet, the drummer given his opportunity to let loose, clapping and cheering from our tables, the joining together, the unity for the closing, the bow to the audience, the musicians mopping sweat as we bellow and whistle.
At a piano bar on the Upper East Side, we closed out the night, my man requested “One for my baby, and one for the road.” It was romantic, echoes of Sinatra, a carriage ride through Central Park, my heart full, even though the relationship died later, and he is dead now, dead long ago, still I think of the piano man smiling at us in our cups as we left the bar leaning on each other.
So this is what the jazz standard means to me. The music, the mystique, young love and old comforts, cocktails and cocktail dresses, swooning and surrender before the power of careers and conflicted warmth of families. The music wafts, on a breeze on memory on anticipation spirals out and back, the lines, the exploration, the solo lost, a moment, and back to unity, the band coming together, maybe the singer, too, the splash of re-entry, the end.
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